St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Your Tech Weblog

St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Apple’s new iPods this month will have competition from Microsoft’s Zune HD, which just arrived in my office. It looks great, but it’s basically a brick until Microsoft gets out the software for the device early next week.

I have never been much of a shutterbug, but Apple recently flipped a switch in my brain. Its iPhone 3GS, which shoots decent still images and not-bad video, turned me into a photographic and videographic madman.

Suddenly, I wanted to document everything – my son’s antics, the landscaping and construction being done at my house, weird stuff I encountered by happenstance. The 3GS makes it so easy, I couldn’t help myself.

My love affair with the Posterous microblogging service began at about this time. I got hooked on its easy posting-by-email system and how it efficiently pushes video and photos to all my fave social-networking sites.

At a recent Social Media Breakfast event at the State Fair, I was in documentarian heaven. Posterous’ PicPosteous app for the iPhone allowed me to incrementally add pictures to photo album within a Posterous post (I could upload video, too). Some of the pictures were panoramas consisting of several shots stitched together with an iPhone app called AutoStitch. Posterous and the iPhone 3GS are a killer combo.

Man, I had fun. Being able to push such stuff up to the Internet from anywhere via ATT’s 3G network (or via Wi-Fi, if available) is a major rush.

So I was very, very excited about seemingly authoritative rumors that a third-gen iPod Touch with a built-in still and video camera would be released this week. This would be big, I thought, because more users of Apple touchscreen devices would go absolutely bonkers the way I have. It would be a picture and video revolution.

So I was astounded when the new iPod Touch emerged as expected — without a camera.

Instead, the slim iPod nano got a camera – video only, no still-shooting capability. That is kind of cool (I will get one of these touchwheel players tomorrow and see how well this is executed).

Compared to an iPod Touch with camera, though, this looks to be a severely limited experience (especially after all my iPhone 3GS adventures).

You can shoot videos, but not upload them anywhere via Wi-Fi; you’ll have to wait until the iPod syncs with a Mac or PC. Forget about documenting your life in photos (which, with the iPhone, involves cool stuff like tapping the touchscreen to adjust an image before shooting). Forget about using apps to push the limits of creativity.

Why Apple passed up this opportunity is baffling mystery. An iPod Touch with a still and video camera would have been big.

Related: Steve Jobs’ unconvincing explanation for the missing camera. Yes, I know the iPod Touch is good for games, but we want to use it for others stuff, too (like, oh, I don’t know, take pictures?)